Wake by Robert J. Sawyer: Review

April 3, 2011

I’ve been a fan of sci-fi since the time I can remember reading, and have read a lot of stories about the emergence of AI, but must say Sawyer does an excellent job bringing together elements that lay a realistic framework for it’s occurrence in the novel. His plot interweaves seemingly unrelated events, and effortlessly brings them together over the course of the book. Interestingly the main protagonist in the first installment is Caitlin, a blind teenage girl recently moved to Waterloo, Ontario. And I must say, the author writes this convincingly. Initially I’d been skeptical – uncertain how a forty-one year old man would handle writing this type of perspective. But he proved more than up to the task, providing a realistic portrayal of both her interests, and day-to-day struggles, not only as a blind person in an ever increasingly vision oriented world, but as a teenage girl moving to a whole new country.

My only criticism with his story is one of internal consistency. When the AI first chooses to communicate, it indicates an inability to do anything but read text files on webpages. But later in that same correspondence claims to have watched a video of Hobo, a primate who becomes an Internet sensation for his paintings. This however is the only fault I can find in another-wise solid book.